WANDA RODRIGUES MARQUES

The Enlightenment thought has been established on the basis of a reason which has not ceased to suffer setbacks. In “Dialectic of Enlightenment” Adorno and Horkheimer pointed out how the development of instrumental reasoning impacted the process of social domination by operating the mystification of mass societies and preventing the possibility of critical thinking. In this sense, the objective is to approach the outbreak of fascist tendencies in contemporary democracies from a broader perspective which contemplates not only conjunctural questions but also the psychic demands of the unconscious since Freudian psychoanalytic theory served as a framework in the Critical Theory of Society to track the misdirections of reason in the face of its frustrated emancipatory potential.